Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/595

Rh T,ocal traditions substituted St. George or St. Theodore for Jupiter, ApoUon, Herakles, or Perseus. " It is under this disguise," adds • ■ ■ M. Brdal, " that the Vedic myth has come down to our oavti times, and has still its festivals and its monuments. Art has consecrated it in a thousand ways. St. Michael, lance in hand, treading on the dragon, is an image as familiar now as, thirty centuries ago, that of Indra treading underfoot the demon Vritra could possibly have been to the Hindu." ^

That this myth should be Euemerised by Firdusi was natural and The epic of inevitable, when once the poet had made Feridun a king of the first Persian dynasty. He could no longer represent Zohak as a monster with three heads, three tails, six eyes, and a thousand forces ; ^ but the power of the old myth gave shape to his statement that, after the embrace of the demon, a snake started up from each of his shoulders, whose head, like that of the Lernaian hydra, grew as fast as it was cut off Nor has it influenced the modern poet only. Cyrus is as his- torical as Charlemagne ; but from mythical history we should learn as much of the former as we should know of the latter, if our information came only from the myth of Roland. What Cyrus really did we learn from other sources ; but in the legendary story he is simply another Oidipous and Telephos, compelled for a time to live, like Odysseus and the Boots of German tales, in mean disguise, until his inborn nobleness proclaims him the son of a king. But as in the case of Oidipous, Perseus, Theseus, and many more, the father or the grand- sire dreads the birth of the child, for the sun must destroy the darkness to whom he seems to owe his life. This sire of Cyrus must belong therefore to the class of beings who represent the powers of night — in other words, he must be akin to Vritra or to Ahi ; and in his name accordingly we find the familiar words. Astyages, the Persian Asdahag, is but another form of the modern Zohak, the Azidahaka, or biting snake, of Vedic and Iranian mythology ; and the epithet reappears seemingly in the name of Deiokes, the first king of the Median nation.

Thus far it is only on Iranian soil that we have seen the struggle The Semi- between day and night, the sun and the darkness, represented as a conflict between moral good and evil, the result being a practical, if not a theoretical dualism, in which the unclean spirit is at the least as

' HerctUe et Caais, 138. ' lb. 130.